I hate the way I used to learn tech earlier by watching a lot of coding tutorials on YouTube, it did a lot of damage to me rather than improving. But, I learned my lesson and now it's time for you to learn.
This is my personal story and also I don't have experience in writing blogs. So, if something doesn't make sense to you please let me know in the comment section. I hope this will help will be helpful for you.
I learned to write code by watching a hell lot of tutorials online on YouTube. Most YouTubers make tutorials and other related videos only about popular languages and frameworks. For example, the MERN stack is the most popular JavaScript tech stack to build full-stack applications.
The problem with this is that the new generation who is starting to learn to code somehow starts learning the same mainstream tech stack because they have heard that language like JavaScript and Python have the majority of jobs in the market and are the best languages. Yes, they do have the majority of jobs, but when you start searching for jobs for a long time, especially for the first job, you start realizing there are plenty of other languages and frameworks that are also in demand in the job market. For example, languages like Java, Go, and PHP can also get you a competitive salary. I am also trying to get my first job as I am still in college, and getting an internship off-campus is quite hard. The companies expect you to already be proficient in any language or tech stack. Only a few students manage to get internships with a good stipend.
I was quite dependent on YouTube tutorials when building projects for my resume. If I didn't understand any topic, I used to go on YouTube and mimic the same solution from there. YouTube video tutorials are good; they can make you start coding quickly (I'm talking about project-building tutorials). They teach you how to build a boring to-do list, CRUD API, social media, etc. Following this approach, I noticed that the code from YouTube tutorials looks easy to read and understand for beginners. But when I tried to contribute to open-source projects, I struggled to understand the code, which was written like it wasn't the same easy-to-understand coding language I used to learn from tutorials. This happens with a lot of newcomers to open source and junior developers who have just started working. So, depending completely on YouTube tutorials is quite risky, and you should start learning how to read docs and written blogs. When you read a blog or docs, you also think about it while learning. But when you are watching a video, you just listen to what the other person is saying and don't do much thinking.
If you're starting to learn code, I would highly recommend you explore some open-source repos and watch how the code looks in production, and how they structure their code. Also, while following tutorials, are you able to understand the code in that repo or not? Additionally, keep an eye on job portals to understand what exact skills you should learn. Please explore different programming languages, especially statically-typed languages, before selecting one. I don't like the so-called beauty of dynamically-typed languages. And if you're learning JavaScript, you will eventually learn TypeScript at some point.
Thank you for taking the time to read! If you find my insights valuable, I encourage you to follow me. In my upcoming posts, I plan to delve into the topic of job searching, which is currently my focus.